enaTmecnierebis sakiTxebi ISSUES OF LINGUISTICS - Tbilisi State ...

simple clitic form of aris "she is". This is, of course, an unaccusative verb
(although it is irregular and did not make this change).
Unlike the change considered in @2.1, this one applies to all unaccusative
verbs (apart from a handful of irregular ones) and to no transitives or unergatives.
However, it distinguishes these unaccusative forms only in the third person
singular subject forms of the present and future.
2.3. The Third Person Plural Subject Marker -nen
In Old Georgian, third person plural subjects in the aorist were marked with
-es for verbs of all morphological types. In Modern Georgian, these forms are
different for unaccusative verbs in the aorist. The effect is shown in Table 3. Each
verb in the table represents a different morphological subgroup.
Old Georgian Modern Georgian
Transitives
midrik’-es midrik’-es "they bent it"
dac’er-es dac’er-es "they wrote it"
hk’itx-es (h)k’itx-es "they asked it"
misc-es misc-es "they gave it"
icn-es icvn-es "they knew him"
Unaccusatives
mi-drk’-es mi-drk’-nen "they bent, were bent"
da-i-mal-n-es da-i-mal-nen "they hid"
da-e-mal-n-es da-e-mal-nen "they hid from him"
še-c’ux-n-es še-c’ux-d-nen "they were bothered,
disturbed"
gan-axl-d-es ga-axl-d-nen "they were renewed"
Unergatives
i-t’ir-es i-t’ir-es "they cried"
kadag-es i-kadag-es "they preached"
mep-es i-mep-es "they reigned"
Table 3. Changes in Marking of Third Person Plural Subjects in the Aorist
Paradigm (Some examples are from Imnaišvili 1971).
The source of this -nen is double plural marking in Old Georgian. Plural
unaccusative subjects and plural direct objects conditioned the suffix -en in Series
II, though not in I. 5 This suffix combined with markers of singular and plural
subjects in transitive verbs as shown in (1-2).
(1) mo-v-k’al "I killed her" mo-v-k’al-t "we killed her"
mo-h-k’al "you killed her" mo-h-k’al-t "y’all killed her"
mo- k’l-a "she killed her" mo- k’l-es "they killed her"
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